Recent posts by Kyru on Kongregate

As someone who enjoyed World of Warcraft for upwards of 3 years as a hardcore Raider, PVP/Battleground enthusiast, and completionist junky, I can honestly say that I prefer The Old Republic.

I’ve put three satisfying weeks into my first character. The storytelling is top-notch and the primary selling point for the game. The voice acting is terrific and really adds to the immersion that the game is able to provide. The game provides you with a meaningful reason to continue advancing your character in that each class has a unique story. Regardless of whether you pick Republic or Sith Empire, you have the opportunity to make both Lightside and Darkside moral decisions which range from sparing an NPC’s life to extorting them, among others (at one point during the Sith Warrior story I was given an option to sleep with another man’s wife).

At the same time, Bioware doesn’t penalize you for only being interested in singular facets of the game. If all you are looking for is PVP, you’ll be able to advance and gear a character through your earnings alone. Whereas in World of Warcraft hardcore PVPing required a significant bankroll and you had to quest rather heavily to level up at any reasonable pace. I haven’t yet felt a sense of “grinding” in the game, and my first character is level 41 (current cap is 50). The story has kept me immersed in the game’s universe and the combat is both fun and rewarding.

Additionally, you receive “Companions” during your story quests which you can summon to fight alongside you. These companions won’t reduce your EXP or loot. They are given you to as a means to complement your own abilities. This prevents any one particular class from advancing any faster/easier than another class. This also allows every single class to progress through the game alone if they so choose (not factoring in quests specifically intended for groups of 2-4 human players, of which make up only 4-6% of all quests). Each class receives a 15s (6.67%/sec) mediation skill which allows them to restore their health out of combat, which significantly reduces downtime while questing.

I’ve maintained a competitive advantage against at-level characters through story progression and PVP Warzones alone. The only drawback to PVP at the moment is that the number of maps is limited to 3, though that number is expected to more than double by June. All of the warzones are Team/Objective-based maps. If you get one or two people out for themselves, that will often cripple you against 8 or 16 working together. (16 player PVP hasn’t been implemented yet. Hopefully larger warzones will allow them to open this up.)

I haven’t had to run through instances (flashpoints), which add more story, including one which is entirely about post-KOTOR Revan and HK-47, in a while, though I fully intend to play through them for the lore factor.

The crafting system is a bit different, but all in all I like it. You’re allowed one equipment crafting profession and two sub-professions (basically gathering professions). The gathering professions exist as both overworld nodes that you can harvest for materials and skill levels as well as missions that you can send your companions on. As of this writing, 3 of my 5 companions are dispatched on Underworld Trading missions for ingredients I need to create a piece of level 40 armor.

Bioware has done a fantastic job at creating an MMO game using the Knights of the Old Republic canon and lore. There are even cameos from and throwbacks to the XBox/PC games by Bioware and Obsidian Entertainment.

I do encourage you to give SWTOR a chance if you have the money to spend on the core game. Your first month is free if you choose recurring billing (requires credit card). So long as you cancel prior to your 28th day of game-time, you won’t be billed for any subscription services should you decide you don’t enjoy the game.

I think Kongregate is stagnating, to be honest. There hasn’t been a whole lot of community evolution lately. Faces are changing, for sure, but the overall investment by your average user is going down. That also has a lot to do with the site having more traffic, though. When there were fewer active users and fewer chat rooms, the forum and chat communities were much tighter. It used to be that if you were well known then most rooms would know you as soon as you walked in. That’s no longer the case.

Grats Tsuppo. I used to think I was one of the fastest. But I guess you beat me. (63 days versus 71).

Kyru
Joined: February 14th, 2008.
Modded: April 25th, 2008.

We could get technical and go based on the day you first chatted to the day you received modship, but that’s unnecessary. However, to put things in perspective I was mod #98. There are now over 630 “M’d” accounts.

EDIT@Tasselfoot: What’s so bad about paying for all of the content at once, when it comes out?
Like, if a game is released at a hundred bucks, and they release some extra content that costs ten, why not instead put that content into the initial release and charge one hundred and ten dollars?

Demand creates DLC. Yeah, Devs have started “cheating” a bit (holding back content for DLC purposes). But the system itself wouldn’t exist if demand didn’t exist. People who LOVE the core game will purchase more content for it.

The model for DLC is such that a publisher can slam on the breaks and retask their development team if a game don’t sell well. Say, for example, that Mass Effect 2 goes on to be a huge bust in sales. Why spend payroll money developing DLC for the game if the core title doesn’t have that much market penetration? The publisher can instead choose to retask the entire team to work on a new game.

Publishers also make more money (proportionate to actual listed price) on DLC than they do the physical core media the DLC goes with. Brick and Mortar stores take a cut. Shipping the physical copies takes a cut. In the end, the publisher doesn’t see all $49 US (or in your case, Happy, $99,95 AU) that people pay for the core title. Because the content is delivered straight from the publisher itself, they make a much larger percentage on $2.99 DLC.

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Tass, send me a shout/whisper with the times you are looking to run. I’m interested, but my work and class schedule may interfere (I’m only available after 6:30 PM Eastern Time).

So you want a golden D for top notch developers? Cool, story.
Too bad none of them would ever show it off, because developers of the top rated games don’t even post on the forums.

You raise a decent point; however, if you were to award better icons based solely on a developers “best average”, the site would have some developers toting gold D’s when they don’t produce anywhere near the quality of higher caliber developers. For example, having a 4.0 average after 500 ratings is not equivalent to having a 4.0 after 100,000 ratings. As far as the “average” is concerned they are identical, but there are other factors which contribute to a game’s rating. If the game gets badges, the game gains popularity, which may raise the game’s rating; however, badges tend to make games more susceptible to rating drops. ESPECIALLY if the badges seem “unfair” or “annoying”. Maintaining a 4.0 after a game gets badges- especially if the game is on the fence between 3.95~4.09, is far greater an achievement.

I suppose if enough effort were put into creating the system, you could make it so that there was a statistical equivalent based on number of ratings versus the average rating. You would have to find some manner in which to weight the rating quantity versus average score.

Both are just as mind numbingly irrelevant. The minigames are mediocre and the lack of any actual control over your character during the races makes the games themselves nothing more than grindfests. Animal RaceWay is a step ahead of Ducklife 3. Although being a step ahead of far below average is still somewhere below average. I still don’t understand why either game was badged.

That’s quite non sequitur, Mambo. Badge-hunters enjoy having badges at their disposal to obtain. Having more and more badges (and therefore more points) available is what drives them to continue giving traffic to the website. Not having badges to obtain is a far more plausible “hell” than having too many unearned at any given time. The casual badge enthusiast is not heavily affected by the rate of badge availability as they often have a plethora of games available to get badges from.

The very small number of games going “unbadged”, combined with the fact that the badge-hungry “I’m out of badges to acquire” group is a very vocal minority of the website, leads me to believe that adding the overhead of more employees dedicated to badge creation would be a waste of money at this point. I’m sure they’ll add another game-focused badge developer+API troubleshooter when they feel they’re losing money by not driving traffic to high quality games I would expect Kong’s daily traffic to balloon by a significant amount (napkin math leads me to say an additional 15-25k unique daily users) to create such a demand.

Greg is mostly involved in directing sponsorships and working with development teams to bring high quality games to Kongregate. His position involves a lot of networking, which requires hands-on time spent establishing rapports with development studios, independent developers, and building those into healthy business relationships.

Rawismojo does the majority of the badge work these days, but he is also responsible for working with developers on API issues, sponsorships, etc. Sometimes there are a bunch of games that come out all at once and are badge-ready and have easily recognizable benchmarks for badges and working API.

This is why “Reemus” games tend to get badged rather quickly. It is far less time-intensive to toss out a “Finish this 15 minute mini-game” badge than it is to find a reasonable figure for how long it takes the average gamer to get all of the achievements in Flood Runner 3. Other games have less obvious goals- like trying to find score thresholds for hard badges on arcade shooters, or determining whether completing Mardek 3 should be two hard badges split into primary and ancillary content, or combined into single impossible.

Kong is trying to maintain the integrity of their badge ratings. There was a month or two there where impossibles were handed out like candy; several of which were honestly just very difficult hard badges by today’s standards. Since then, they’ve been a bit more conservative in both badge quantity and badge difficulty.

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